Monday, March 30, 2015

The Western press has been engaged in a major PR campaign destined to convince the public that Climate Change does not exist or it is not human-made. Perhaps this campaign could end soon, together with the collapse of the shale oil and gas bubble in the US

So, we have now a presidential candidate in the US who explicitly denies the human role in climate change (and compares himself to Galileo for doing that!). He is not alone, a majority in the US senate seem to take the same position. Also, the public in the US, by far and large, seem to be less inclined to see climate change as a serious problem than the public in every major country in the world (image below from Ecowatch.
.

Are Americans more stupid than the rest of the world? Probably not; on the contrary, the US has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, just as it has the best universities, the largest number of scientists, the largest number of Nobel prizes, and more. But then, why do Americans deny so strongly the human role in climate change? The favored explanation that can be read on the web is that it is due to cultural factors and, in particular, to a diffuse "anti-intellectualism" in the American culture.

That might be, but an entity such as "anti-intellectualism" is hard to define and one could argue for it being present in many other countries. I think we should look for something else. One element that we may examine is that the disbelief in the human role in climate change has a starting date: look at this image (from Gallup)

You see the remarkable dip in the belief in anthropogenic climate change that occurred approximately between 2007 and 2010. So, what happened that caused such an effect? Likely, one important factor was the 2009 "climategate" story, the diffusion of stolen e-mails exchanged among climate scientists. We may also see another, smaller, drop in 2013-2014 that might be related to the meme of "climate change has stopped" that started to be diffused in late 2012. But neither story, alone, is enough to justify such a major effect. Both had to be promoted and diffused in the media to have an impact. The real cause of the changing public perception is how both stories were managed as part of an anti-science public relations (PR) campaign.

But, then, why is it anti-science PR so much more important in the US than it is in the rest of the world? Here I think that we can find an interesting correlation with some economic factors. The PR storm that attacked climate science goes in parallel with the development of the America shale oil and shale gas industry which grew to become a major component of the US hydrocarbon production in little more than ten years.

Bubbles grow on belief, and belief is the result of successful PR campaigns. It was PR that, for a while, managed to generate powerful memes such as the US "energy independence" or "a century of abundance" of shale gas. The main pitch for the shale industry came with the period of fastest growing production; approximately starting in 2005. As the industry grew, the public perception of the climate problem went down.

It is well known that PR works best when it is question of demonizing an adversary and it is no surprise that it was used in this way by the fossil industry. One target was their main competitor: renewable energy. But much more damaging to the shale bubble was climate science and the concept of "unburnable carbon." If ever this idea were to take hold of the law making process, then, it would have been the end of the legend of "a century of abundance". Hence, climate science and climate scientists were a legitimate target of the PR campaign by the fossil industry.

The toxic legacy of this anti-science campaign has left a deep impression on the American public. The "anti-intellectualism" that some people claim to be a cause of the skepticism of the public about the climate problem may actually be an effect of this campaign.

Now, with the collapse of the oil market, it is likely that we'll see the bursting of the shale bubble. Prices may recover, at least in part, but never again the industry will be able to regain the past momentum and to speak of "centuries of abundance" to come. So, in parallel, are we going to see the end of the anti-science PR campaign? Will climate science denial collapse together with the shale industry? Maybe not right away; the effects of these campaigns are often long lasting. But, at least, from now on, they'll have less and less money to use to spread lies around (*).

Monday, March 23, 2015

Results of a search for "world hunger" using Google Ngram Viewer. Clearly, the perception of hunger as a major world problem is relatively recent: it peaked in the 1980s and it remains well entrenched in our collective consciousness today. Would climate change show the same trajectory in the future? And, if it does, does it mean that the problem can be solved? Or won't we only make problems bigger in the efforts of solving them?

Momentum is clearly building up for climate action, even though denial is still putting up a stiff resistance. So, in a way, things are going well, but is it enough? Do we still have time for significant action against climate change? And if we will engage in such an action, will we take the right decisions?

Normally, the key of the future lies in the past and we can examine our present situation with climate in light of an older problem: world hunger, which went through a path of perception and action which may go in parallel with the climate problem.

Famines have a long history and, in ancient times, they were often perceived as "acts of God." The idea that something could be done against hunger took time to penetrate humankind's consciousness and we can perhaps find a first glimpse with the satirical essay titled "A Modest Proposal" written in 1729 by Jonathan Swift (best known for his "Gulliver's Travels"), where he proposed that the Irish poor should sell their children as food for the rich English. In reading it, you get a feeling of the frustration that Swift felt for the way the problems of Ireland were perceived in his times and, clearly, that hunger was no concern of the elites of the time. One of the results was the slow and ineffective response of the British government to the Irish famines which came in later times, in particular to the great famine of 1845 that killed millions of people.

Perceptions about world hunger changed in mid-20th century and the interest in the problem rose up rapidly and peaked in the 1980s. Afterward, it went down, but remained a clearly visible problem, something that everyone agrees it must be acted upon. Can we hope for a similar evolution of the concept of climate change? If we use google Ngram viewer, we can compare the terms "world hunger" and "climate change" and here is the result:

We should not pay too much attention to the relative magnitude of the curves. What counts is that the "climate change" curve has not yet saturated, but the use of the term is growing rapidly. It may still take some years before the curve reaches a peak, but there may arrive a moment in which the importance of climate change becomes obvious and nobody will deny it any more.

These are good news; but there is a problem. Suppose that the moment comes when everyone agrees that climate change is a big problem and we have to do something about that. Then, will anything be done? Will something be done fast enough? And will the right things be done? On this point, I am afraid that there will be problems. Big problems.

Let's go back to world hunger: most people today seem to agree that it is a success story and that the problem was solved by the so called "green revolution" that is, greatly increasing food production worldwide. It was, surely, a remarkable technological success, but did it solve the problem? Or didn't it just create a rat race between food production and population? In this case, we only made the problem bigger, instead of solving it (a case of the "black swan" trap). And the green revolution is all based on the idea of turning fossil fuels into food. But if population keeps increasing, while the stocks of fossil fuels can only decrease, we are going to have big problems. Actually, enormous problems. We'll never solve the hunger problem if we can't manage to stabilize the human population.

The reaction of humankind to climate change could be the same. Once we finally recognize that it is a problem, we may look for some technological quick fix to solve it and that may only make the problem bigger. Think of the various proposals of climate engineering that involve at spreading reflecting substances in the high atmosphere. If some of these proposals were implemented, then we could keep emitting greenhouse gases without generating atmospheric warming; and we probably would. Then, with emissions going up, we'll need more screening of sunlight, and, with more screening, we would keep emitting. It would be another rat race between emissions and screening. And what if something were to go wrong with the management of solar radiation? Something we didn't predict or we didn't understand? Then we would be in deep, deep trouble (anyone said "black swan"?). We'll never solve the climate problem if we don't manage to stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Nobody likes to play the role of the catastrophist but, here, it is clear that we have a gigantic problem. It is not so much a physical or a technological problem, it is that we never developed methods to solve worldwide complex problems; we mostly tend to worsen them. It happens all the time (the political situation in North Africa and Middle East comes to mind as just another example). There have been several attempts to develop new and more effective ways to tackle big problems, such as focussing attention on the leverage points of systems. These methods are true game changers, but will any decision maker pay attention?

Friday, March 20, 2015

The publishers of "Frontiers" provide readers with a remarkable pitch for their activities that includes the lavish use of terms such as "grassroots", "community oriented" "empowering researchers," and the like. Unfortunately, reality is far from these fantasies. "Frontiers" is not a grassroots initiative, but a profit oriented, commercial publishing house, and scientists have no control on what they decide to publish or not to publish.

I described in a previous post how the science publisher "Frontiers" took down a perfectly legitimate paper in climate science on the basis of unscientific criticism they received - a story that led me to resign from the position of chief scientific editor I had with them. Now, they did it again, although in reverse: they refused to take down an unscientific paper about AIDS on the basis of perfectly legitimate scientific criticism they received about it. What they did was, instead, to demote it to an "opinion" paper. That only made the problem worse.

Let me state it clearly: the business of a science publisher is to publish peer reviewed scientific papers. Opinion pieces can find space in scientific journals only when dealing with issues that can't be solved with the standard scientific method; say, about science policy. But it is totally wrong for a science publisher to publish bad scientific papers under the label of "opinion pieces." For that, we have plenty of tabloids that can do the job.

What Frontiers did is not just a minor mishap: publishing bad science about serious issues such as AIDS is dangerous as the treatment of AIDS is an issue of life and death for many people. Unfortunately, however, the diffusion of "open access" journals managed by scientifically incompetent editors is leading to a proliferation of bad science. And this bad science appears, at first sight, as legitimate, "peer reviewed" articles that can badly mislead the public.

This is a problem deeply ingrained with scientists having delegated the dissemination of their result to commercial publishers. In principle, there is nothing wrong with publishing as a commercial enterprise but it is turning out that scientists have no real control on what these publishers (even supposedly "serious" ones) publish or do not publish. The case of Frontiers shows this point very clearly. So, the only possibility we have - as scientists - to contrast this trend is to avoid submitting our work to publishers who clearly show little or no understanding of the basic elements of what science publishing should be.

In the following, you can find the responses of a group of Italian scientists to the paper on AIDS that Frontiers published.

Last September,
Frontiers in Public Health published an AIDS denialist paper by Patricia
Goodson, a psychologist who teaches Health and Kinesiology at Texas A&M
University. Following the immediate reaction of the scientific community,
the publisher Frontiers launched an investigation to look into the
peer review process and to understand how the paper came to be published.

During this
investigation Frontiers “has sought expert input from the Specialty Chief
Editors of the HIV and AIDS section of Frontiers in Public Health and
Frontiers in Immunology”, which led to a conclusion that ended up turning
what could be a simple, however serious, oversight of peer reviewers and chief
editors into a debacle of the journal: Dr Goodson’s article has been re-classified as an “opinion” piece,
“which represents the viewpoint of an individual”.

So the paper continues to be
indexed on PubMed and can easily be used by the AIDS denialist movement for its
propaganda in social networks and among lay people with HIV or who are at risk.
Used in this way, the paper's re-designation as an "opinion" article rather than
a "research" one is purely academic.

With a group of friends at the
Italian HIVforum and with the support of four Italian scientists, I’ve sent a
letter of complaint to Frontiers’ editors. The Frontiers Editorial Office
Manager replied acknowledging receipt and promising a more comprehensive
response “in a few days”. It's now been two weeks and there’s no trace of that
“more comprehensive response”.

As PLWHAs,
scientists, clinicians and activists we are dismayed at the decision
of Frontiers in Public Health to publish an article whose sole
purpose is to promote HIV/AIDS denialism: Questioning
the HIV-AIDS hypothesis: 30 years of dissent.
(1)

The individuals who
developed this piece are associated with a well-known internet based
group (2)whose ideological purpose is to convince people with HIV/AIDS, and
those who are at risk, that the virus does not exist or is harmless,
that their diagnosis is a fraud, that HIV/AIDS is not sexually
transmissible, and that competent treatment of the disease including
the prevention of mother to child transmission is a cruel hoax
perpetrated by greedy and foolish doctors, the pharmaceutical
industry, governments, and gay activists.

It is difficult to
understand how in 2015 a professional journal focused on public
health could willingly lend support such a perverse project.

As a work of
supposed scholarship, the paper is of manifestly poor quality.
Likewise, its call to public health practitioners to take seriously
such claims and to engage with them in informed debate is
disingenuous: such “debates” have been carried on ad nauseam for
decades, and serve only as a tactic to generate sound and fury in
order to try to convince the denialists’ target audience that there
is genuine uncertainty in the scientific and medical communities
about whether HIV exists or causes any human disease. (3)
Attempting to engage denialists is pointless: they have demonstrated
conclusively over the past 30 years that they are impervious to
evidence based counterargument, and will simply repeat the same
claims over and over despite repeated refutation and painstaking
explanation. Invariably such “debates” degenerate into personal
attacks, and on a number of occasions to lawsuits.

Clearly, no one
familiar with the basic science could take any of this paper’s
contentions seriously, but its purpose is not to convince competent
scientists or clinicians. Its purpose is to try to lend a veneer of
credibility to their argument, when they target their main audience
in social media. (4)

Dr. Goodson’s
opening argument that “according to established immunology
principles” the detection of antibodies necessarily demonstrates a
past resolved infection and not a present one will be recognized as
nonsense by anyone with basic science literacy, but is calculated to
provide false reassurance to people with HIV who are struggling with
their diagnosis.

She concludes her
argument by blithely dismissing at a stroke the vast epidemiological
literature demonstrating the causal relationship between HIV
infection and AIDS with the statement that “epidemiological data do
not provide evidence for causation”. It beggars belief that someone
who teaches public health in a US institution could so profoundly
misstate the fundamentals of her field, or that such a statement
could pass unremarked on in a public health journal.

In between, she
recites a familiar litany of tired falsehoods, misrepresentations and
misapprehensions designed to mislead her intended audience into
ignoring and dismissing measures to prevent, diagnose and treat a
serious infectious disease. Dr. Goodson asserts, for example, that an
HIV-1 Western Blot with bands at gp41, p32, and p24 is read as
“negative” in Africa and Australia, which is patently false.
Citing no less an authority than Dr. Henry Bauer himself she claims
that HIV-1 p24 and gp41 are “found in blood platelets of healthy
individuals.” which is again untrue. She states that “a
retrovirus is nothing more than RNA with an outer protein shell”
which “enables it to bind to cells of the type it infects”,
ignoring the lipid bilayer envelope and other key components of
lentiviruses.

She states
incorrectly, that antiretroviral drugs “destroy the immune systems’
healthy T-cells”, and “cause a collapse identical to AIDS”, and
that the apparent “miraculous recovery” observed by patients with
AIDS using them is nothing more than a temporary illusion created by
their broad spectrum antimicrobial effects.

There is nothing in
Dr Goodson’s paper that warrants informed debate, nor any insight
that could possibly contribute positively to public health.

We cannot understand
how such obvious untruths and misrepresentations were able to pass
through the filter first of the peer review and later of an
investigation which has “sought expert input from the Specialty
Chief Editors of the HIV and AIDS section of Frontiers in Public
Health and Frontiers in Immunology”. (5)

Open access
publishing is not merely a discourse among scholars but its very
accessibility intersects with that of lay social media where it can
be open to abuse by interests that seek to borrow the reputation of
peer reviewed journals to further agendas inimical to public
interest: this creates an enhanced obligation on publishers to be
mindful of potential audiences and to avoid causing harm to readers
who might lack the background knowledge and skills to evaluate
contentious and clearly counterfactual claims, especially where such
deliberate misinformation might lead individuals to make poor health
decisions.

While it may have
been the intention of the publisher that such claims might be
conclusively dealt with by open debate on their pages, in reality
this has not been possible in the case of HIV/AIDS denialism for many
years, if ever. Such "debates" are futile because
denialists by their nature are not amenable to reason or evidence,
and in reality there is no dispute among informed scientists and
clinicians about whether HIV exists and causes disease. (6)

Frontiers' publisher
has possibly misinterpreted the lack of public engagement with Dr
Goodson's absurd paper as approval of, or at least indifference to,
its publication. In fact many of us have trusted the good sense of
Frontiers' editors to take appropriate action for such a bizarre
submission with obvious adverse implications for public health, and
did not wish to add unnecessarily to the publisher’s further
humiliation by contentious public criticism in the comments.

Unfortunately our
trust in the judgment of Frontiers' senior editors appears to have
been misplaced. The decision to demote the paper to “Opinion
Article” will make no difference to the intended lay audience who
will see only that Goodson’s claims are published in a peer
reviewed journal of some repute, and are therefore credible.

The original
publication of the paper was an embarrassing error which has
highlighted to readers and potential contributors a significant
deficit in the journal’s editorial oversight. In its Statement
of Concern,
the publisher has promised to make public the outcome of its
investigation into how this paper came to appear in its journal. (7)
To date this has not occurred.

The decision by
Frontiers’ senior editors to support continued publication despite
being made aware of the likely public health consequences of such a
decision is incomprehensible, and appears to demonstrate indifference
to, or a lack of understanding of, the journal’s responsibilities
to its readers, contributors and to the wider community.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Star Trek: a low budget TV series. Cardboard models of spaceships, few and simple special effects, a small number of actors always engaged in the same mock-up of the command bridge of a starship. And, yet, it influenced a whole generation.

The death of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Mr. Spock in the original TV series "Star Trek" has ended an age. Star Trek was a true 20th century saga, a way of seeing the world. To some of us, it may look completely obsolete, today, but it must have been telling us something deep; something important, if it was so successful, so followed, so revered by so many. So, what was the secret of the series? It was not technological wizardry; it was the human side of the story. It was a story that told us of how it was possible to have harmony in diversity.

The literary origins of Star Trek go back to Homer's Odissey, but its immediate ancestor is "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. With all the obvious differences, the similarities are many and obvious. One is that the Pequod, the ship of Moby Dick and the Enterprise, the starship of Star Trek, never land anywhere, they just wander over the oceans and in the interstellar space. And, despite all the technological wizardry involved, the command deck of the Enterprise looks very much like that of a 19th century ship (and, maybe, Odysseus himself would have found himself at home sitting in Captain Kirk's chair).

It has been observed many times that Melville's microcosm echoes the structure of the American society of his times, a society which needed to integrate and harmonize its different cultural elements. Think of the character of Quequegg, the tattooed islander who appears very early in the novel and, in a sense, characterizes it. But, if the Pequod is America, it is also a society which is already facing its limits in its search for a disappearing resource: whales. This is why I described "Moby Dick" as "The greatest peak oil novel ever written".

With "Star Trek" we have again a microcosm of the American society. But this future society still faces the problem that the Pequod was facing, a problem that was so deeply felt in the 1960s, when the series was born, that of the limits to human expansion. In Star Trek, humans can travel in the Galaxy but can't (or won't) expand in it. The economy of the "United Federation of Planets" seems to be a steady state one; they don't seem to be obsessed with economic growth, actually they may not even use money! In Star Trek we see no economic growth, no population increase, no industrial production, no attempt of humans to exterminate alien races in order to colonize other planets. The Enterprise hops from one planet to another without ever stopping anywhere, without ever leaving a long lasting trace of its passage. It is like the wake left by the Pequod on the sea, which disappears leaving no trace.

So, with Star Trek, if the problem is the limits, and if you can't go on exterminating aliens in order to steal their planets, then the solution is harmony in diversity, the same as one of the main themes of "Moby Dick" with the multiracial crew of the Pequod. The central point of "Star Trek" is not technology, it is not the future, it is people; and one character in particular: first officer Spock, the equivalent of Quequegg in Moby Dick; the alien to be integrated and, at the same time, respected. Note how the relation of Captain Kirk and Spock mirrors that of Quequegg and Ishmael of Moby Dick. In both cases, they recognize their respective cultural difference and they respect each other. As on board of the Pequod, the deck of the Enterprise is a place where individual differences are neither ignored nor rejected, they are accepted and valued. Star Trek lacks the negative character of Captain Ahab of Moby Dick, and hence emphasizes even more the positive results of collaboration of different individuals. This is the "secret" of Star Trek: harmony in diversity.

In a sense, the message of Star Trek echoes that of "The Limits to Growth", the 1972 study that first quantified the physical limits to human growth on the surface of the earth. The study was the result of the intuition of a man, Aurelio Peccei, who had asked the question of how human beings could live in justice and prosperity on a limited planet. The answer that he obtained from the scientists was a statement of the obvious: humankind cannot grow forever on a finite planet. Little was said in the "Limits" study about the destiny of humankind beyond cold graphics and tables, and that was one of the reasons of its downfall in the decades after its release. But Peccei had not really asked for graphics. He had asked a question that computers could not answer at that time and cannot answer today. The real answer was that we don't need to grow forever to live in harmony without losing our diversity.

It is an answer that Peccei had surely in mind, but that was shadowed, and eventually lost, by the great noise created by the debate on the Limits to Growth. But, perhaps, we can find again and one of the places where we can find it is in Spock's words "Live Long and Prosper." So simple as that: we could live long and prosper if we wanted, but we haven't learned how to do that. Probably we never will and the command deck of spaceship Earth remains manned by homicidal psychopaths.

h/t to Alexander Stefes for the discussion that led me to write to this post

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Google Ngram's results for "propaganda". The term seems to have been most popular in a period that went from the 1940 to the 1970s, gradually losing interest in the following years. Of course, however, propaganda didn't disappear - it just went undercover.

I distinctly remember one day when I was - maybe - twelve; when my father saw me reading something that was lavishly illustrated with red flags and with hammers and sickles. He looked at that, very worried, then he relaxed. "Oh..., " he said, "that's fine: it is our propaganda." At that time, in the 1960s, my father was active in politics and the house was full of pamphlets of the Christian Democratic party.

What I was reading was one of those pamphlets, full of vivid images of the deformed faces of Soviet communists crushing women and children under their booted feet. Those papers have disappeared from the house long ago, but examples of that old propaganda are easy to find on the Internet. You can see one on the right; it is an image that goes back to 1944, but the style and the message are the same of the time when the cold war was in full swing. Note how the caption says "Dad, save me!"
echoing the well known slogan that "communists eat children".

Of course, also the other side, that of the communists, was using the same kind of naive propaganda methods and neither side seemed to think there was something wrong with that. My father, for instance, found natural and legitimate that his political side would openly engage in propaganda. It was "our" propaganda, fighting for us in the political struggle, just as "our" artillery was fighting for us in war. In a war, nobody would claim that the guns on their side were shooting
flowers at the enemy.

It was only in later times that propaganda changed its face. The term never disappeared from usage, but it slowly fell out of fashion, at least in the sense that it became politically incorrect to say that one's faction was using propaganda. It was only something used by "them," not by us. "Our" side would never debase itself by using propaganda.

In part, the term "propaganda" was replaced by more neutral terms, such as "consensus building" and "public relations." In large part, however, in the West, propaganda went undercover; fully exploiting Baudelaire's observation that "the finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist." It became refined, unobtrusive, subtle. And it was incredibly successful in convincing Westerners that it didn't exist - maybe for a while it even disappeared for real! Perhaps it wasn't needed any more during the period of Fukuyama's "End of History," when everybody got genuinely convinced that the collapse of the "evil empire", the Soviet Union, had shown the superiority of economic liberism. At that time, everyone knew that we just needed to sit down and relax to enjoy the goods that free markets would bring to us. There was no need any more to be told over and over that our enemies were dangerous, baby-eating monsters.

But, in recent times, something has changed. Propaganda is back with a vengeance. Here is just an example:

You see? No matter how you see the recent crisis in Ukraine, you have to admit that, in terms of propaganda, we are back to the methods of the 1950s and the 1960s, just a bit more sophisticated in graphical terms, but still based on the same simple theme: our enemies are baby-killing evil monsters. It is an accusation that has been fashionable and effective from the times when the Romans accused their Cartaginese enemies to sacrifice children to their god, Baal. Note how, in the image, they have managed to put the image of a child close to the title, "Putin's killed my son," even though they are completely unrelated stories (that shows, incidentally, the contempt they feel for their readers.)

We are not yet arrived to accusing Vladimir Putin of eating babies, but - as things stand - we may not be far away from that. Look at the image, here, titled "Bloodymir;" where Putin is shown with blood on his mouth, as if he had just finished his breakfast of child meat. And these are just a few examples of the new wave of propaganda that is invading the Western media. It is amazing how these simple tricks worked in the 1950s and 1960s and still seem to work today. And it seems that they are being used to take us straight to a new war. A lot of people, indeed, seem to be reasoning today just in the same way people reasoned in the 1950s: it is "our" propaganda, hence it must be good.

We can see propaganda as one of the several failed technologies of the
20th century, just like nuclear powered cars and weekend trips to the
Moon for the whole family. Propaganda never promised to take us to the
Moon, but, at the beginning it, was touted as a way to build informed consensus in a democratic society. That was the theme, at least, of Edward Bernays' 1928 book, titled "Propaganda," where he stated that that propaganda is not just good, but essential for democracy: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of
the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element
in democratic society."

Evidently, something went wrong with these ideas. In its commercial version, propaganda became
an instrument to convince us to buy things we don't need, while, as a political tool, it
turned itself into the evil form we call today "psyops," the deliberate dissemination of lies to cast an enemy in a bad light.
It is a form of black magic; powerful but extremely limited and often backfiring. Psyops can only create enemies, not friends. In the end, the effect is the opposite of what it was
supposed to do in Bernay's times: by casting an external or internal opponent as "evil", consensus is destroyed, not created.

Nevertheless, Bernays had a good point: we need consensus. Of course, we don't need the forced uniformity that can be achieved by a dictatorship, but, without consensus on some basic points, it would not be possible to keep a democratic society going. The rule of the law, the need of due process, people's basic rights, are all part of this consensus. And there never was a moment as today in which we are so badly in need of consensus on such vital subjects as climate change and resource depletion which threaten the very existence of human civilization. But we are not achieving a significant consensus on these critical issues; what passes for "debate," today, is a sterile clash of absolutes were psyops have been used with great effect to destroy the credibility of a whole generation of climate scientists.

So, we are stuck: we need to manage a planet, but we don't know how to do it. Will we ever be able to find an agreement on something important that doesn't involve hating or bombing someone? Maybe there are ways, but we haven't found them, yet.

_________________________________________________________

(*) Maybe you are curious to know what was the effect of a massive exposure to right-wing propaganda on a teenager (me) in the 1960s. Well, it is a long story, but I can tell you that too many and too blatant lies can badly backfire. The story of my very wavering juvenile political positions is not so interesting, but I can say that one of the reasons that led me to become a scientist was to search for an unbiased truth, somewhere, perhaps the result of the overexposure to propaganda I experienced in my youth. Over the years, I found that even science is not without biases, but, at least, in scientific debates we don't accuse our colleagues of eating babies.

Who

Ugo Bardi is a member of the Club of Rome and the author of "Extracted: how the quest for mineral resources is plundering the Planet" (Chelsea Green 2014). His most recent book is "The Seneca Effect" to be published by Springer in mid 2017

Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog is dedicated to exploring the future of humankind, affected by the decline of the availability of natural resources, the climate problem, and the human tendency of mismanaging both. The future doesn't look bright, but it is still possible to do something good if we don't discount the alerts of the modern Cassandras. (and don't forget that the ancient prophetess turned out to be always right).

Above: Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan, 1898

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Extracted

A report to the Club of Rome published by Chelsea Green. (click on image for a link)

Rules of the blog

I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it